Few writers tread the line between popularity and critical acclaim as well as Emma Cline, whose novels The Girls (2016) and The Guest (2022) have earned her a film deal, a Shirley Jackson award and a place among Granta’s best young American novelists. Cline is at her core a far rarer breed than even Granta can boast of her. She is a supreme short story writer, and it is in this form — acknowledged by her Plimpton Prize for the Paris Review’s Marion (2013) — that she is at her most immaculate. Cline extols Cheever and Eisenberg when asked about formative texts. In numerous interviews she likens the execution of a successful short story to the placement of an acupuncture needle; her second ‘novel’ The Guest pins the reader under the ripples of a gleaming pressure point. Its intertexts, structuring, and design choices all contribute to the spirit of a short story. When the needle is extracted on the final page the fleshy recalibration expected from the novel form is withheld.
The Guest spans a drowsy week in late summer where Alex, a beautiful but anonymous young woman, drifts around Long Island. In a bid to avoid New York’s uninterested ‘customers’ and a drug-dealing lover seeking recompense Alex has attached herself to the holiday plans of Simon, a wealthy man, 30 years her senior. Following a blunder at a dinner party Simon tells Alex to leave. She infers that she need only pass the five days until Simon’s Labour Day party at which she will surprise him and all will be forgiven. So begins a weeklong traipse through exclusive beach clubs and new social circles. The anticipation of each day imparts an illusion of progress but Alex’s life drops away inconclusively at either end of this agonising week. The story is a sliver of golden skin and oyster bars, a glimpse of an unbreachable world where beach car parking is reserved for property owners.
The sparseness of The Guest frustrates even its keenest fans. Cline attributes this to a readerly fetish for ‘trauma math.’ The reader is denied information that may influence a judgment of Alex beyond the boundaries of the week they are privy to. There are no school flashbacks, pimp beatings, or harrowing family connections. All is revealed organically: threatening messages from a broken phone, a familiar escort at a hotel bar. The New York Times reviewed Alex as not so much an ‘anti-heroine’ but a ‘non-heroine’ as all knowledge must be gleaned from her actions. There are too many unknown variables in the sum for further speculation. This is in sharp contrast to Cline’s debut novel The Girls in which an LA teen is indoctrinated into a cult clearly based on the Manson family. A novelistic trauma math is worked out in full, abounding from a shared cultural horror of what is bound to come and the protagonist’s bi-part perspective which spans the cult years and her recollection of them 20 years later. It is notable that The Girls and The Guest bookend Cline’s three-book deal with Random House Publishing. The second publication was the short story collection Daddy (2020) which may have informed the distillation of The Guest.
Alex’s sporadic movements are governed by one principle beyond her erraticism: an inclination towards bodies of water. The Guest opens with an unforgiving riptide — suggesting (heavy-handedly) that she is flotsam in this coastal milieu — and is consequently mapped by submersions in pools, hot tubs, bathtubs, and the Atlantic Ocean. The swimming pool is an apt allegory for this non-heroine who shifts her form to be accommodated by changing social perimeters. This structure overtly references John Cheever’s sensational short story The Swimmer (1964), in which another New Yorker, Neddy Merrill, determines to “swim across the county” one afternoon. He traverses the eight miles home from a summer soiree via fourteen neighbours’ pools, swimming one length in each. The watery odyssey begins with a picket fence vigour and ends in utter disorientation, each pool marking an unexpected descent into madness and ostracization. The Cheever reference is perhaps the only trauma math that Cline grants a knowing reader; her ending may be ambiguous, but Alex’s instinct to water foreshadows an American Dream run aground.
This organising principle signals Cline’s allegiance to the short story. A comparison with another intertext, Ottessa Moshfegh’s cult novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) further delineates The Guest from novel status. In both texts, a beautiful, narcissistic, forgettable, thin, New York-based blonde attempts self-negation within a time frame upon which only she has projected significance. Cline reportedly began writing The Guest in 2016 and returned to it in recent years. It is impossible to say whether she read Moshfegh’s novel during her own process although it seems likely. The similarities are manifold and the authors are friends, currently collaborating on Cline’s project ‘Picture Books.’ At first impression, the texts seem twinned together in a long tradition of Didionesque women, but as Cline’s week manifests the short story, Moshfegh’s year is in every way a ‘trauma math’ novel. The protagonist’s transitional year ends in New York in early September 2001, mooring it to something far more substantial than the next swimming pool. It is not an interim in negative space, but a year in sequence that bridges Easton Ellis’s empire/post-empire distinction.
In his review of Daddy (2020), Brandon Taylor called Cline “an astonishingly gifted stylist” a compliment that is as applicable to her publishing and design choices as to her wordcraft. The title was selected after the book’s completion. In Latin, ‘hospes’ is a contronym, translating to both ‘guest’ and ‘host.’ Alex embodies this duality in her parasite status. She is Simon’s guest on the affluent coastline but, like many of the other lower-status characters, she hosts her rich companions, moving amongst them by regulating the reality they wish to perceive. As an escort, she hosts male fantasies. To trespass at a beach club she hosts a child for the day, taking on the guise of an au pair. This anamorphic quality is perfectly captured in Oliver Munday’s cover for the American edition. An outstretched hand protrudes from the book’s spine at once begging and offering aid. Cline sends out further ambiguous ripples with a spacious, typewriter-like font that references Didion’s Play It As It Lays (1970), the prototype of the unravelling American woman. Every design choice magnifies irresolution, hinting at some wider plane of significance that the text itself refuses to acknowledge.
Through Emma Cline’s portal, the reader understands Alex insofar as a blind man can glimpse a cathedral. With perfect precision, Cline drops a novel-length needle into a mass of ricocheting pulses and energy blockages. Then she grasps the reader's eye in place over the point of insertion.
Ate